She Rode Her Bike in Circles
Lizzie’s first kiss happened in her mom’s white minivan, in the rain, driving home from the Blue Lagoon.
“Hey,” Dylan said, sliding into the passenger seat. “Sorry.”
“You’re soaked,” Lizzie said, looking up and down at her dark denim ensemble which clung to her body in a way that reminded Lizzie of how her old Newfoundland, coming in drenched from a walk, looked fifty pounds thinner. She half expected Dylan to shake herself dry and splatter her with drops. “How long were you waiting outside for me?”
“Not long,” she lied, clearly. “Couple minutes.”
Lizzie didn’t push it. She felt bad, but she was doing her a favor, after all. General Chemistry wasn’t going to study itself—and yet, here she was.
Shifting the minivan into reverse, she glanced over at Dylan, whose eyes were glued to something outside the window as she took off her glasses and attempted to dry them on her shirt. She maneuvered a three-point turn, splashing through a puddle on the side of the road.
“So,” Lizzie said, once she pulled out of the side street. “Fun night?”
Dylan’s shoulders move halfheartedly. “Not exactly. I probably should’ve taken a page out of your book.”
“Not unless you like the molecular structures of organic compounds,” Lizzie said, adjusting her glasses on the bridge of her nose before quickly re- turning her hand to its vice-like grip on the steering wheel. Hydroplaning was no joke.
Putting her own glasses back on, Dylan laughed dryly. “I don’t, but. Still should’ve stayed home and studied. Don’t know why I thought coming here was a good idea.”
“I’m sorry it didn’t go well,” Lizzie said. As much as she wanted to know the juicy details of what went down between Dylan and that girl she was meeting—Clare? Clarisse?—she didn’t push, because she wasn’t a pusher. Especially not with Dylan.
The friendship she had with Dylan, like most, was not a tight bond, but more of a loose slipknot that could come untied with one half-hearted tug of the thread. The only reason they even had something at all was because over twenty years ago, Dylan’s parents had bought a house next to Lizzie’s.
They had crawled around in the yard together as infants, or so they were told. As far as Lizzie could recall, Megan—who lived across the cul- de-sac—was always Dylan’s best friend, until one day she wasn’t. She wasn’t sure how that had happened, exactly. They could’ve easily blamed—probably did blame—Megan going to a private junior high school that was forty-five minutes away, joining the dance team, flitting between shitty boyfriends and never spending more than a month away from them since she was fourteen. But that’s around when Lizzie started believing any knot could be untangled. Because when Megan slipped out of Dylan’s life, Lizzie was just about the only thing she had left in it. Quiet Lizzie, unassuming Lizzie. Lizzie who sat out after school on her front porch and read Young Adult bestsellers in her rocking chair.
In middle school, John Green was her favorite. She would never have admitted that, of course. But she was pretty sure that rocking chair was still stained with tears from when she first read The Fault in Our Stars, and from when she read it a second time.
It was during that second time that Dylan was buzzing around their tiny cul-de-sac in circles on her green bicycle, pedaling so fast that watching her made Lizzie dizzy, so fast that she was never moving upright, always bent over at an angle, making an endless turn.
Brakes squeaking, Dylan skidded to a stop at the end of Lizzie’s driveway.
“What are you reading?” she called.
And as much as Lizzie wasn’t a pusher, she wasn’t a shouter. She ig- nored her, looking back down at the open page.
Gears clicking as she sighed and put her feet back on the pedals, Dylan rode closer, all the way up to the steps below Lizzie’s feet.
“Can you tell me now,” she said, using what Lizzie’s favorite sixth grade teacher would call her library voice, “what you’re reading?”
Lizzie held up the book so Dylan could see its bright blue cover.
Dylan squinted. “I’m not wearing my glasses.”
Lizzie put it back down into her lap. “Why?”
Dylan gestured to the bike on which she was perched. “They’d fall off my face.”
Lizzie huffed. “Maybe they wouldn’t if you rode it like a normal per- son.”
“Huh?”
“You’re just doing tiny circles the whole time,” she said, miming the motion with a finger in the air.
“Well, what else am I supposed to do?” Dylan asked. “We live on a tiny circle street.”
“You could go somewhere else,” Lizzie said. “Go bike to Francisco’s and get some ice cream.”
Dylan raised an eyebrow. “Are you asking me to get you some ice cream?”
“No. I’m asking you to leave so I can read.”
“You’re no fun,” Dylan said. And then: “Can I borrow it when you’re done?”
Lizzie held the book close to her chest like she was going to run up and snatch it. “Why? You don’t even know what it’s called.”
She shrugged. “If you’re reading it again, I’m guessing it’s good.”
“How do you know I’m reading it again?”
“You’ve been out here every day for the past week holding that same freaking book. I know it can’t take you that long.”
Lizzie was struck by the thought that Dylan paid attention. That when she was whizzing by on her bike, instead of focusing on rounding the endless turn, she might actually be looking. “Really?”
Dylan shrugged again. “Just a hunch.”
Lizzie glanced back down at the page. She was almost done, again. “Well. I guess you can borrow it, then. When I’m finished.”
“Great,” she said. “Shout for me.” And she pedaled back into the street.
But Lizzie didn’t shout, so instead, she walked across the grass to Dylan’s house, left it on her front porch, and then went back inside. It was get- ting dark, and Dylan had abandoned riding in circles in favor of going down the main road, maybe to Francisco’s.
Afterwards, that summer, they started hanging out.
Before that—one-on-one, at least—they never really had. Except for when they were infants, maybe, if Lizzie’s mother was to be trusted. Only at neighborhood cookouts, or snowball fights, or birthday parties. They never even had the same teachers at school.
But then they did hang out, almost every day. Sometimes they rode bikes, Dylan showing off by lifting her hands from the handlebars and pedal- ing like she was on a unicycle, Lizzie wobbling along in first gear because she didn’t want to go too fast. When they could scrounge up enough spare cash, they went to Francisco’s, where Lizzie ordered cookies and cream and Dylan ordered mint chip, but mostly, they stayed in the cul-de-sac, and many days, they sat on Lizzie’s porch—Lizzie on the rocking chair, Dylan perched on the stairs—reading. Dylan was, Lizzie supposed, finally putting her glasses to good use.
When, after three days, Dylan finished The Fault in Our Stars, she slammed it on the wooden steps at Lizzie’s feet. The Newfoundland (named Lucy; seven-year-old Lizzie was a C.S. Lewis fan), resting her head on her paws, flinched at the sound.
“Why the hell would you wanna read this?”
As she demanded an answer, Lizzie tried her best to look offended instead of feeling her heart race at the tears streaming down Dylan’s face. She had never seen her cry.
“It’s good,” she said. “It’s a great book.”
“But it’s so sad. Why would anyone want to read such a sad story? It just makes you feel like shit.”
Lizzie flinched at her language. Her mother might never let her back onto their front porch if she heard her say that. For a moment Lizzie imagined her, like a cat, picking Dylan up by the scruff and carrying her right back over to the house next door, but she realized then that she was thinking of a version of her mother that hadn’t existed for a few years. Lizzie was in middle school now; maybe she was allowed to swear.
“It’s a great book,” she repeated.
“Well, give me something happier next time,” Dylan said, scrubbing at her cheeks with the back of her hand.
So, next time, she did. She got her started on the Percy Jackson series. She figured Dylan might like something with a little adventure, a little magic.
And she did. She showed up on Lizzie’s doorstep the next day demanding the second book, and then the third, and the fourth.
That summer marked the closest Lizzie ever was to having a best friend, she thinks.
Then they were in middle school, and they joined different extracurriculars—soccer for Dylan, orchestra for Lizzie—and they no longer had the time to sit on the front porch passing books back and forth, because as soon as they got home, for one, it was already dark, and only growing darker as the months passed. They also had to get right to studying, because soon enough they were in high school, and eight AP classes between the two of them weren’t going to finish themselves.
So Dylan stopped riding her black bike in circles around the cul-de- sac, and Lizzie stopped going outside altogether, for the most part.
They had a snowy couple of winters, during one of which Lucy passed away, and hot summers, during which Lizzie spent most of her free time in the library’s air-conditioned study rooms when she wasn’t volunteering behind the front desk.
And then, not feeling bold enough to leave behind her hometown, she accepted an offer to the same college that Dylan did—unsure if it was for the same reason—and they didn’t need to formally reconnect, because social media made it easy to know exactly where everyone from your past was living, who they kept as friends, what they ate for breakfast. It wasn’t hard for Lizzie to notice Dylan again, posting dimly lit photos of the sidewalk between the library and the humanities building.
It was a tiny frog she saw on the path, on the first truly brisk October night, and Lizzie wrote to her, Cute frog. And that was that. A friendship, or something like it, rekindled.
Meaning: Dylan waved to Lizzie when she passed her waiting in line at the cafe between classes; Dylan chose to sit next to her (or maybe it was the only empty seat) in their second-semester French 102 class; Dylan asked to join her at a table in the library during finals week, when all the others were occupied.
The library became the place where they saw each other, mostly. The library was quiet.
Lizzie had always enjoyed the quiet. That’s why she liked to read out- side, on her front porch, where during the day, all she heard was the occasional rattling of a garage door, the shouts of younger kids as they threw wiffle balls and failed to hit them, and the click of a bicycle chain as it shifted gears.
On her front porch, she was soothed by the grating drone of the television, in front of which her mother sat for eight, ten hours each day, eyes reflecting her shows right back at the screen; on her front porch, she could pretend her father wasn’t on his way home, already loosening his tie, already prepared to ask if the bills had been put in the mail and if the expired milk in the fridge had been thrown out, already knowing the answers, already dialing the number of the local sub shop, placing an order for two, one of which Lizzie and her mother would share.
In the library, Lizzie enjoyed the quiet, but she also longed to hear Dylan’s voice.
Dylan called and asked if Lizzie could pick her up from the Blue Lagoon.
They were both in their junior year. Lizzie had a job in the library’s archives, where she spent twenty hours a week doing her homework, wrapped in a cardigan, listening to the air conditioning—and, on a few occasions, pointing a lost professor in the right direction to find some historical college document. She lived in an off-campus apartment, in a bedroom of her own, with a few girls she didn’t know very well. Each month, her dad sent her half the rent, and he made sure she would never forget that act.
Dylan happened to live in the triple-decker next to hers, so maybe asking Lizzie to pick her up from the bar just made sense.
Or maybe it was because she had told Lizzie about that girl she was seeing. Clara—that was her name.
Dylan had arrived at one of their study sessions a few weeks prior with her lips upturned a bit more than usual, a little more bounce in the step of her Doc Martens. Lizzie didn’t comment on this observation, because she wasn’t a pusher. But she could be known to pry—a slower, more careful, more discrete tactic.
“What are you working on?” she asked, behind her own book as Dylan hunched over her laptop.
“Group project,” she said.
Lizzie groaned. “The worst.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Dylan said. “This one’s not so bad.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I don’t know. My partner’s alright. I mean—she’s nice. And she’s getting her work done.”
“That’s a first,” Lizzie said. “Can I please have her name and contact info to make sure I get into all of her classes next semester?”
Dylan laughed—softly; they were still in the library, after all.
“Clara O’Connor,” she said. “Marketing major. I don’t know if you’d know her.”
Lizzie did, in fact, know her. Know of her. Lizzie followed a lot of people on Instagram. Clara was…she was in student government, wasn’t she? She was always in their party photos, at the very least.
And student government members were perhaps the most egregious frequenters of the Blue Lagoon. So, when Lizzie eventually managed to wriggle the information from Dylan that she was going there one weekend, it wasn’t difficult for her to understand why.
Sitting in the dark kitchen of her empty apartment, sipping a hot tea and thumbing through John Milton’s Paradise Lost as rain streaked down her dirty window, her mind couldn’t help wandering to two potential outcomes of Dylan’s adventure.
Outcome one: Clara really does like Dylan in the same way Dylan seems infatuated with her; Dylan and Clara start going out; Dylan gets in with a new crowd; Dylan stops coming to the library.
Outcome two: Clara is playing with Dylan’s feelings; Dylan and Clara never see each other again; Dylan is heartbroken; Dylan decides love is never worth pursuing, ever.
In either outcome, Lizzie realized, she was screwed. Because, she had also come to realize—slowly—she had feelings for Dylan. Feelings you’re not supposed to have for your next-door neighbor turned college study buddy.
It was something that felt inevitable. It was something that felt like it would be written into a John Green book. It was something so eye-rolling-ly embarrassing and coo-worthily, sickeningly sweet.
She was not sure when it started. Maybe it was when she sat down next to her in French 102. Maybe it was when she first asked to borrow The Fault in Our Stars. She didn’t think it mattered.
Their friendship was a slipknot. More accurately, Lizzie was the knot, and Dylan was the needle. She could hold onto Dylan as tightly as she wanted, but it was still so easy for Dylan to simply slide out of the whole equation. To finally move on to some better friends, some more ambitious life, some fancier cul-de-sac in some faraway city. And Lizzie would be left right where she was, probably returning to her parents’ house when she graduated, unraveled.
So, when her phone vibrated on the kitchen table at 10:35 p.m., the screen lit up and displaying Dylan’s name, she answered.
And she threw a rain jacket on over her baggy, ratty high school sweatshirt (whose cracked, peeling vinyl barely said GO TROJANS anymore in its maroon lettering), cursed to no one but the dark clouds above when she accidentally left her keys on her nightstand, and drove the two miles around the corner to pick Dylan up from the Blue Lagoon.
Lizzie had never been to the Blue Lagoon, and she never imagined that this would be her first experience with a bar.
Parked on the curb, she couldn’t really see the inside of it. It didn’t have windows, and the glass in the door didn’t display much other than darkness. She didn’t roll down her windows, and the rain was too loud to hear anything else, anyways.
From the outside, it looked utterly drab and uninviting. It was a short, stout building wedged on the street corner between two competing auto repair garages—Luigi’s and Big Anthony’s. Ironic, Lizzie thought, that you could try driving home drunk and end up in a fender bender, and both of the nearest places to get your bumper fixed were right back where you made your bad decision. Like they were watching you, waiting, preying.
Though slightly annoyed, Lizzie was glad Dylan called her for a ride, just to avoid something like that happening. But Dylan didn’t have her own car, anyway. She likely walked here, if she hadn’t hitched a ride with Clara, probably before the storm began.
Lizzie had tried to decipher what had happened based on Dylan’s tone in the phone call. Maybe it was hard to tell over the tinny speaker and back- ground noise, but she hadn’t sounded too distraught. It was a simple, “Hey, so sorry to bother you, but would you be around to do me a huge favor?”
Normally, Lizzie hated when people posed a question that way. Hey, can you do me a favor? How about telling me what your favor is before I give you a definitive answer. Because maybe you’re asking me to pick you up a package of toilet paper while I’m at Dollar Tree, or maybe you’re asking me to proofread your twenty-page British Literature essay (for which you clearly didn’t do the reading) at eleven o’ clock the night before it’s due.
But in this case, it’s Dylan, and Lizzie thinks she might drive across the entire continent if Dylan said she needed to be picked up at a bar in San Francisco. Or go to a supermarket to get her the ultra-soft, luxury toilet paper instead of what she usually buys at Dollar Tree.
Clearly something must be wrong if she’s thinking about how she’d like Dylan’s ass to be comfortable and un-irritated.
She hoped, as she picked up speed (but not too much speed—hydro- planing), that Dylan’s ass was at least somewhat comfortable in the passenger seat of her mother’s minivan, which Lizzie was allowed to keep at school and drive because her mother lived ten minutes away, so if she needed groceries or to get to a doctor’s appointment while Lizzie’s father was at work, Lizzie could have it covered, and because Lizzie’s mother never drove anywhere, anyway.
Still, taking the minivan was a tough decision. Lizzie nearly let it go when her mother nearly cried, saying she would be trapped and stranded and all alone in the house. But her father retorted that she was the one trapping herself here all day, by her own choice. And that Lizzie had classes and a job and would pick up all the groceries, just like she did in high school.
Lizzie thought sometimes that the only reason her father stayed with her mother was because he made just enough money to do so. Her father was a very meticulous man, an accountant by trade and by lifestyle, who kept every receipt and counted every online purchase and scanned it all with a grimace.
If things weren’t adding up, Lizzie thought, he would leave her. Because that would’ve cost money, too, of course, and he wouldn’t’ve failed to factor that in. So, everything must’ve been coming out even.
A glance to the right told her that Dylan was leaning against the door, looking out the window at the passing streets and houses and storefronts.
Set against the darkness, the glow of street lamps refracted through the beads of water on the glass, and it looked like Christmas lights.
Lizzie turned on the radio, which she usually didn’t. It was playing “Ain’t No Sunshine.”
She was a bit surprised when Dylan started humming the melody. But it wasn’t exactly a cheerful singalong. There was a melancholy in the roughness of her voice, in the way it caught and cracked on certain notes and turned into something like a whisper.
Neither of them said a word until they were back on campus, pulling up to Dylan’s apartment building. That’s when Dylan finally looked back at her, let her shoulders fall in a movement mimicking the second half of a shrug, and sighed.
“Sorry again,” she said.
Lizzie shook her head. “No big deal.” Silence, except for her squeaking windshield wipers. She turned them off. “I’m sorry again, too. That your night didn’t go as planned.”
Half of Dylan’s mouth tightened, and she turned to look out the windshield. “It was nothing, anyway.”
Lizzie paused. Agree and let her go—that was her instinct. No push- ing.
But here she was, in her mom’s minivan. Over her shoulder, piled in the backseat, lay stacks of books written by other people. The sweatshirt she was wearing bore the name of a school she didn’t go to anymore—not to men- tion she’d never once gone to a Trojans football game. And in her passenger seat waited a girl who wasn’t her best friend, wasn’t ever really her best friend, because maybe she was Lizzie’s, but Lizzie was never hers.
So:
“It wasn’t nothing,” she said. She stared at Dylan, unblinking. Taking her in, running mascara, wet hair, black denim, and all. Squinting through her streaked glasses.
Lizzie reached out, slowly, cautiously, like a fox attempting to follow a bear, hoping to maybe get a piece of its prey—and slowly, cautiously took them off of Dylan’s face.
Dylan said nothing, but she watched as Lizzie used the hem of her dry sweater to rub them clean.
When they were done, she handed them back—silently, with nothing but a hint of a hope of a chance of a smile. Dylan didn’t lift her hand, so she left them on her lap. Like she left The Fault in Our Stars on her front porch.
“Thank you,” Dylan said.
Lizzie nodded. “No problem.” Her voice cracked a little.
“I guess it wasn’t nothing,” she said, glancing down at her lap and then back up again. “It sucks. It really sucks.”
Lizzie nodded again. “I know. Trust me—I know what it’s like.”
“Yeah?” Dylan said. Lizzie didn’t miss how her eyes widened for a moment. “Yeah,” she continued. “I guess I just have to move on, though.”
Lizzie hummed lowly.
She smiled a little, then. “Do you have any recommendations?”
“Well,” Lizzie said, glancing at her backseat.
“Excuse me?”
When she turned back, Dylan was red-faced. Lizzie’s skin quickly prickled.
“Oh, God, no, I didn’t mean…that,” she managed. “Um. I just meant—I mean, I have a lot of books back there. If you want to borrow one.”
Dylan blinked, paused, and then laughed. Lizzie liked the way she laughed. She looked like she had swallowed a lemon, but then saw somebody trip and fall over their shoelaces, which she had undoubtedly tied together.
“You’re telling me this MILF mobile doubles as a personal library?” she asked.
Lizzie rolled her eyes. “You’re gross. But, yes. Kind of pathetic, I know.”
“Nah,” Dylan said, shaking her head. She leaned closer, still looking at Lizzie, and for a second, she thought—but then she was unbuckling her seat- belt, reaching over the center console, and rummaging through the stacks. All the while, her body was uncomfortably close. Uncomfortably in the sense that she smelled like a cedar balsam candle and her denim jacket stretched tight around her shoulders.
“Oh, this is a thick one,” she said. And when she came back into her seat, she was holding The Goldfinch.
“Indeed,” Lizzie said, smiling. “You can have it, if you’d like.”
“Would I like it?”
She hummed. “It’s pretty sad. But it does have a somewhat optimistic ending.”
“Okay.” Dylan placed the book gingerly on the dashboard. “To be honest, I can’t even read what the title is without my glasses on.”
“It’ll be a fun surprise, then.”
The left corner of her lips turned upward. Lizzie noticed a few freckles on her cheeks, mimicking the raindrops on the window behind her.
“Maybe that’s just what I need,” Dylan said.
Until that moment, Lizzie hadn’t noticed how much she was leaning on the center console with her elbow, and how Dylan wasn’t backing away, sitting sideways in the passenger seat with her right leg folded up.
“I—” Lizzie started, and it was like the final drop that tipped the whole bucket. “I’m kind of in love with you.”
It came out in one breath, one sudden icy rush of water.
Lizzie was not a pusher. She hadn’t pushed for anything at all for so long that the potential energy inside of her had no choice but to explode.
Dylan blinked—once, twice.
Lizzie couldn’t shut her eyes or look away; she had more pride than that. She thought about how Dylan could barely see without her glasses on, how at least her face probably looked like a blur. Maybe that impacted her hearing, too. Maybe she heard I’m craving some guava juice.
“Oh,” Dylan said.
There was no book that told you what to say after that. They always kissed, fell in love, and you turned the page to read the epilogue. There was no oh, I’m not.
“Sorry,” Lizzie said. “Sorry. You don’t have to say anything.”
“No, no,” Dylan said, shaking her head. “No. It’s okay. I’m just, like… processing.”
“It’s not a big deal,” she muttered.
“No, it is.” Dylan had the audacity to laugh a little. “I’m always falling in love with the wrong people.”
Inside, Lizzie fumed. “Are you saying you’re the wrong person? Or I am?”
“Aren’t we both?” Dylan asked. She motioned between them, like they were tied together by an invisible string, and she could run her fingertips along its length. “Wrong places, wrong times.”
Lizzie blinked. “So you’re saying you were.”
“I was. In love with you.”
“When?”
“When we were twelve. Obviously.”
“When you rode your bike up to my house? And stole my books every other day?”
“Yes. Didn’t you notice the little hints I left for you? The parts of sentences I’d underline, or put little squiggles next to?”
“Those were hints? I was just mad that you were marking up my books. Idiot.”
“Oh,” Dylan said. She sounded genuinely remorseful. “I’m sorry.”
Lizzie shook her head. “I don’t care. I really don’t.” The pressure in her chest makes her feel like she’s underwater, like she’s holding her breath. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway, she thought. She didn’t know what it meant to be in love with someone when she was that young. She didn’t even fully understand what it meant to be gay or straight. It was just a word she heard on the news, while she passed through the living room.
“Well,” Dylan said. She picked up her glasses—finally—and put them on her face, pushing the bridge up with her index finger. “I do. I care about you, Lizzie. Maybe not in the same way you care about me.”
“Okay,” Lizzie said. Because what else can you say to no?
“But,” Dylan said, and the t sound hangs like a brown leaf in late September. “I’m not saying never.” Lizzie stared.
“I’m saying that maybe—potentially the part of me that was in love with you then hasn’t died.”
“You’re being ridiculous. You’re just trying to make me feel better.”
“I know.” She adjusted her glasses again. “But, fuck, Lizzie, I don’t know what else to say.”
Lizzie grimaced. “Well. Neither do I.”
Her heart beat about ten miles per minute.
The rain kept streaking its way down the windshield.
“Goodnight, Dylan,” she said. Because there was nothing else.
The pressure inside her had pushed; she had burst. She was now empty.
She put her hand on the stick shift and moved it into reverse, assuming that would be enough of a cue for her to leave.
But Dylan covered Lizzie’s hand with her own, and moved it back into park.
“Would you wait for me, Lizzie?” she asked. “If I needed time?”
Oh.
Would she?
“I’ve waited twenty-one years and haven’t even held hands with anyone,” Lizzie mumbled.
Staring down at the shifter, Dylan slowly linked their fingers together.
“Well, I can do that for you,” she said, voice quiet.
“You know what I mean,” Lizzie said. “In a romantic way. With some- one who actually liked me.”
“I do like you,” Dylan said.
“Not in that way.”
“Well, I don’t know anymore.”
Lizzie wanted so badly to tear her hand away. She felt like screaming. But it was cold, and Dylan’s was warm. “You just feel bad for me.”
“That’s not true,” Dylan said. “I always thought you felt bad for me. I thought that was why we were friends.”
“What? That’s ridiculous.”
Dylan laughed. “I’m serious. I thought that you thought I was stupid. And you were giving me all those books because you thought I finally took an interest in something that wasn’t riding my bike in circles.”
“You don’t still ride your bike in circles. I hope.”
“I don’t. But I do run after girls who don’t want me like a puppy chasing its tail.”
Lizzie swallowed. Her knuckles must have been white. “I should get home,” she said. “It’s late. We can talk about this another day.”
“Okay,” Dylan said. “That’s okay.”
Then she lifted Lizzie’s hand from the shifter—slowly, cautiously. “Don’t start backing up before I get out. You’ll run over my foot or something.”
She couldn’t help rolling her eyes.
This girl really was ridiculous, in every possible way.
“I won’t,” she said.
And then Dylan raised Lizzie’s hand to her face, and like a foreign prince bowing to a queen, kissed it.
Immediately afterward, she dropped it like it burned. “Sorry if that was stupid.”
Lizzie was too busy listening to the pounding of her pulse. No Bill Withers music could possibly drown it out.
Dylan opened the door, offered an awkward, tense smile and wave, and ducked her head under the back of her hoodless denim jacket as she ran through the pouring rain.
Lizzie turned on her windshield wipers again.
Maybe one day, she thought as she watched a blurry Dylan disappear behind the blurry entrance to her blurry brick building, she’d live to tell the tale of a ridiculous girl who rode her bike in circles, breaking hearts and stealing books—a real playboy—and making promises she couldn’t keep.
Or maybe she’d write a different story.